4/07/2010 @ 6:00PM

The Curse Of Darryl Strawberry

The New York Mets couldn’t have asked for a better day to open their 2010 season Monday: sunshine, temperature pushing 70, and old friend Darryl Strawberry in the house to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Then again, watching Strawberry make the rounds with reporters and Mets brass was a reminder of all that’s gone wrong with the franchise since he left it 19 years ago.

Drafted No. 1 overall in 1980 by new Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday, Strawberry, with his 6-foot-6-inch frame, power swing and cocksure attitude, became the cornerstone of a talent foundation that also included Dwight Gooden and Lenny Dykstra. A year after he reached the big leagues in 1983, the club rocketed from last place to second, kicking off a seven-year run in which it won 59% of its games–a turnaround from 40% over the previous seven years–and took the 1986 World Series. Shea Stadium morphed from a mausoleum into the city’s rowdy, celebrity-spying hot spot. Attendance nearly tripled over Strawberry’s first five seasons.

Strawberry played his last Mets game Sept. 27, 1990, going 0-for-3 in a win over the Montreal Expos. Since then the club has won 1,495 games and lost 1,521. They have reached the postseason three times in the last 19 years, with no championships. That’s despite carrying one of the majors’ 10 highest payrolls in 15 of those seasons and a top-five payroll in 10 of them. If the Boston Red Sox suffered through the Curse of the Bambino–an 86-year championship drought attributed to their sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees–call the Mets’ whammy the Curse of the Straw Man.

The club has thrown away hundreds of millions of dollars on bad contracts for players past their prime or just plain mediocre. Call it a hazard of trying too hard to compete with the Yankees. Under the shadow of its crosstown rival, the team has eschewed patient rebuilding in favor of the immediate reload, an expensive model of waving money at big-name players that began after Strawberry bolted for his hometown Los Angeles Dodgers in 1991.

Not everyone believes New York fans can’t be patient, whatever their reputation.

“I do think the fans will tolerate rebuilding,” says longtime Mets broadcaster Howie Rose, who nonetheless thinks the Mets’ talent level is sufficient enough to avoid a complete overhaul. “I could care less about the Yankees–you need to worry about yourself.”

If only. The practice continues to haunt the franchise as it enters a pivotal season. The Mets’ inaugural season at Citi Field wasn’t a smashing success. The team officially played to 93% capacity based on tickets sold, though the visible swaths of empty seats at many games indicated many fewer people were at the ballpark most nights. About 400 of 7,600 club seats went unsold.

And the toughest test lies ahead. Convincing plan holders to re-up for Shea Stadium’s final season (nostalgia) and Citi Field’s first season (novelty) was simple enough. But given a rough economy, directionless team and high prices–single-game seats go for as much as $460–luring fans through the gates in 2010 and beyond figures to be a bigger challenge.

“The next season or two will determine where the Mets go with the next generation of fans,” says industry consultant Marc Ganis of Sports Corp. “Are they going to continue to be Yankees lite, or carve out their own identity?”

Blame the Yankees lite approach for costing the Mets the crown of most popular baseball club in New York, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that go with that. The Bronx Bombers have been the city’s premium brand for so long now that a whole generation has grown up assuming New York has always been a Yankees town. Not so. Beginning in 1964, the year the Mets moved into Shea Stadium, they outdrew the Yankees in 21 of the next 29 seasons, including all the campaigns in which the two teams’ won-lost records were comparable.

Those days are sure over. The Yankees have now beaten the Mets at the gate for 17 straight years. They’re also cleaning the Mets’ clock in newspaper column space, which was rarely the case a generation ago. And their consistent winning only tells part of the story. Chalk up the rest to the Mets’ feeble attempts to reinvent themselves every few years with new names and risky contracts, while turning out few productive homegrown players. It’s not a formula geared toward carving out an identity for fans.

“It’s been almost a voluntary abdication of their position,” says Ganis. “It will be at least a generation before they get that back.”

That abdication has cost the Mets some $450 million in ticket and cable television revenue over the last 10 years, Ganis estimates. He cites the difference in Mets and Yankees attendance figures since 1999 of more than 6,000 fans a game, translating to about $250 million in revenue during the decade.

He also figures that the $30 million gap in annual cable money between the teams would be closer to $10 million if the Mets still had their old cachet (to completely close the gap would be a stretch, given the Yankees’ ability to market the ghosts of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle et. al, as part of a long, storied history). That adds up to $200 million in potential cable revenue the Mets have left on the table over the last 10 years.

Wilpon, who gradually asserted more control during the 1990s before buying out Doubleday in 2002 and installing his son Jeff as chief operating officer, has lost an undisclosed chunk of his personal fortune to scammer Bernie Madoff. The Mets’ valuation declined 6% from last season, to $858 million, despite a new ballpark, dropping them from second to third place in Forbes’ ranking of team values. The team’s percentage of debt to enterprise value of 81% is the third-highest of the majors’ 30 teams. And naming rights sponsor
Citigroup
, which pays the team $20 million annually, is still licking its wounds after a massive government bailout.

Wilpon, who declined to comment through a club spokesperson, has publicly stated that his Madoff losses won’t pressure him to sell the team.

Then there are all the outsized contracts that still make Mets fans shudder. Following Strawberry’s exit, general manager Al Harazin tried to rebuild on the fly by investing $45 million in veterans Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman and Eddie Murray. The expensive disaster led the club into a six-year losing funk and attendance decline.

Harazin, who has since moved on to a quieter life teaching history at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts, says he was under no pressure to make any specific moves, but that it was made clear to him that long-term rebuilding wasn’t an option. “I certainly thought I understood what ownership wanted,” Harazin says. “Once you’ve had success, it’s tough to go back.”

The Yankees have had their share of bad contracts, too (Rondell White or Hideki Irabu, anyone?). They’ve just been better positioned to cover up their mistakes since grabbing a significant money edge in the late 1980s, when they inked a $55 million per year cable deal with MSG Network. In 2002, following four world championships in six years, they launched the YES Network, an even more lucrative cable channel of their own, with
Goldman Sachs
.

The Mets, at the peak of their popularity in the mid-1980s, made the mistake of locking into a long-term cable agreement that cut them off from the escalating rights fees of the 1990s. They finally escaped four years ago to form their own network, SportsNet New York. But the $53 million they take in annually from SNY still leaves them a step behind the Yankees, who now pull in more than $80 million a year from YES.

The Mets continue to spin their wheels trying to keep up. Since 2002 the club has coughed up some $300 million for a list of underperformers that includes Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz, Mo Vaughn, Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez, Billy Wagner and Oliver Perez.

How bad were some of these deals? Glavine and Martinez, a pair of aging future Hall of Fame pitchers, got a combined $102 million from 2003 to 2008 and returned a combined record of 93-79. Moises Alou, a 40-year-old outfielder, gave the Mets 58 runs batted in for $15 million. Then there’s infielder Kazuo Matsui, the Japanese import who got $21 million to hit .266 while enduring two-plus seasons as a favorite target of Shea boo birds.

“In a market like New York, it’s tough. Rebuilding means telling your fans you won’t win for about four years,” says current General Manager Omar Minaya, at the helm since 2005. “You can do it; the question is whether it’s a good business model.” A tough question to answer for an organization that hasn’t tried it for two decades.

The win-now approach has produced its occasional short-term successes: The Mets earned postseason berths in 1999 and 2000 on the back of $91 million slugger Mike Piazza. And expensive acquisitions Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran helped bring a 2006 division title.

But the past three years have brought more high-priced disappointment: September collapses in 2007 and 2008 followed by an injury-riddled 70-92 disaster in 2009 that exposed the risks of building a roster with little depth to support a handful of expensive stars. Minaya’s latest toys, starting pitcher Johan Santana, reliever Francisco Rodriguez and outfielder Jason Bay, will have set the Mets back $240 million by 2013. Ouch.

Meantime, Strawberry, looking good enough at 48 to trade his flashy pinstriped brown suit for a uniform, was a welcome sight to 30-and-over fans who couldn’t possibly have known just how much they’d miss him. Realistically only three of his eight seasons in New York could be called outstanding, the rest bringing bursts of power interrupted by bouts of moodiness and inconsistency.

What he was: the central character and chief buzz generator of the last true foundation the Mets built before handing over the keys to the city to the Yankees. And leaving about half a billion dollars on the table in the process.